Taking the plunge and starting up your own business is a courageous act. Betting on yourself is always exciting, and the risk helps fuel your drive to make it work. Little by little, as you grow, seeing all of your hard work start to pay off is the next great celebration. But when your orders begin to exceed your capacity to serve them effectively, that’s when you have to start evolving your infrastructure. If you don’t, you’ll be stuck spinning your wheels, and that lightning you caught in the bottle will quickly escape.
Your 24-hour turnarounds on Shopify begin to turn into days and weeks, and soon your once-excited client base is upset they haven’t seen a response, and they are ready to pack up and head elsewhere.
So what do you do? You want to keep up and keep your business thriving. Shopify partners with over a million users just like you and this dilemma is common.
Many entrepreneurs have turned to outsourcing their customer experience teams and have never looked back.
How Does Outsourcing Work?
Instead of wasting precious hours putting out fires and answering mountains of emails, turn to organizations that are ready and willing to partner with you.
Don’t worry that you’ll have to expand your staff beyond your means. It’s totally unnecessary. As boutique e-commerce sites have flooded the market, eCommerce outsourcing businesses are growing to meet the customer service demand.
There are a number of ways to seek support ranging from customer experience to fulfillment, and if your business begins to take on greater staff numbers, HR and payroll services are also available.
What all this comes down to is your vision for your business, how far you want to it to grow, and how much of your life you want it to consume.
Once you have secured the support you need, you can get back to what made you great in the first place without having to bend time to accomplish everything yourself as a one-person band.
As you shop around, you will find that there are a number of new ideas and companies to explore. In order to create the most seamless business relationships with your contractors, and subsequently, your client base, you must integrate new systems with your platform.
Instead of wasting precious hours putting out fires and answering mountains of emails, turn to organizations that are ready and willing to partner with you.
Don’t worry that you’ll have to expand your staff beyond your means. It’s totally unnecessary. As boutique e-commerce sites have flooded the market, eCommerce outsourcing businesses are growing to meet the customer service demand.
There are a number of ways to seek support ranging from customer experience to fulfillment, and if your business begins to take on greater staff numbers, HR and payroll services are also available.
Integration
Once you decide to find an organization to take on your business needs, the next step is to establish relationships and expectations with your new team.
For customer service outsourcing, having clear and concise business models will eliminate any extra confusion as you move forward. With those in place, introduce your new team members to your Shopify platform. You can invite them on with staff profiles so that they can view the important metrics that they need to optimize your partnership.
This is where those models for workflow must be easy to understand. You will be able to run training sessions for how to operate the niche quirks specific to your account.
Having procedures in an easily accessible place will make everyone’s life simpler; Google docs is a useful tool for this. You can certainly find what works best for you, but the idea is that you are able to a) centralize your procedures, b) give access to your various third-party software programs for things like accounting and shipping, and c) have a company calendar to ensure appropriate scheduling.
Having those elements in place will get you on your way to building a structure that supports your new client demands without hurting your growth.
What About Fulfillment?
Now that you’ve organized help for customer service in your business, what about the final delivery? Fulfilling orders is what makes the transaction complete and is the lifeblood of your business.
You can waste days sweating over packaging and stumbling to shipping centers, but don’t. You can contract organizations to handle that for you, as well.
There are three main ways you can fulfill your orders.
In-House
This is where you are solely responsible for everything. You stock, sell, market, package, and ship everything on your own.
Dropshipping
This is a completely hands-off approach that takes care of everything for you. You will not have to think about sales, marketing, storage, or delivery.
Outsourced
This splits the difference between in-house and dropshipping. With outsourcing, you handle the marketing and sales while storage and delivery are taken care of by a designated outsourcing partner.
In-House
Keeping order fulfillment in-house allows you to have final say over everything, but it also taxes your ability to satisfy scaled orders. It’s important to note that customers have more and more choices when it comes to prompt delivery, and this could cause your ability to compete to take a hit.
Dropshipping
Dropshipping certainly opens up a lot of bandwidth to reinvest your time into business development, but it’s also the most expensive option. You’ll have to be in tune with all of your expenses to make sure that your gains justify the losses.
Outsourced
Outsourcing allows you to be flexible in how much you want to do yourself and how much you want to pass on to the other guys. Things like storage and shipping can be hard to manage in-house at the same time you’re keeping up with customer service and everything in between.
Each of these options has their own advantages and disadvantages, and your choice comes down to how far removed you want to be from your products.
Whichever method of order fulfillment you choose, be sure you are taking steps to maximize your customer service and the overall health of your business.
